With the continuing expansion of packet-based communications and the ability to support audio, video, and voice using such communication techniques, there is a need to manage communication resources. These resources need to be managed to ensure quality of experience (QoE) levels for subscribers. Ensuring QoE levels not only requires assurance that a sufficient amount of resources is available for a subscriber's communications, but also ensures that a subscriber is not allocated more resources than are deserved.
For current real-time high fidelity audio offerings over packet networks, these audio sessions often suffer from extreme latency as well as excessive bandwidth consumption. There are currently no mechanisms to control the QoE levels for the participating endpoints, based on the associated subscription agreements. Generally, the endpoint cannot be relied upon to ensure that subscriber agreements are followed. Thus, there is a need for a mechanism to allow network policy servers to be able to control network resources such that QoE levels are maintained as desired. Since QoE levels may change from one session to another as well as from one subscriber to another, there is a need for a way to control QoE levels based on network constraints and subscriber agreements. There is a further need to provide these solutions in an efficient and effective manner.